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Friday, June 13, 2014

Boycott Shrimp

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We all like to think that, were we alive two hundred years ago, we would be vigorously anti-slavery. But slavery, alas, is not confined to the past.

The Guardian has published a shocking article about the Thai shrimp fishing industry, where large numbers of men are bought and sold like animals, tortured, and sometimes killed . . . all so that our supermarkets can have a ready supply of cheap shrimp.

Unlike too many of the world's atrocities, this is one we can do something about. Here's the relevant sentence from the article: "An anonymous Thai government spokesman claims that the problem could be easily dealt with, but there is no political will to do so."

Let's create the political will. Boycott shrimp. Tell everyone you know. Put a link to the Guardian article on your blog. Share it on Facebook. Tweet it. When the supermarkets can't give the stuff away, and tons of shrimp lie rotting in the holds of the slave fleets, and the Thai shrimp industry is on the verge of collapse, something will be done.

But apparently not before then.

You can read the Guardian article here. Parts of it will make you feel ashamed to be human.

Me, I love shrimp. But I will not eat it again, no matter what the source, while this goes on.

I guess if you can find brown prawns or other varieties of shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico then you might as well buy them(don't forget domestic shrimpers are suffering from unfair competition that profits from slave labor), but if you're at a low to mid-end restaurant it's reasonable to assume the shrimp there comes from Thailand or somewhere else in SE Asia, and chances are that it as grown with fish meal produced by these "ghost ship" suppliers.